Anchorage offering another round for tourism grant program

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Anchorage tourism businesses working to rebound from the significant dip in visitors caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are in luck, as the municipality is offering another round of grant funding for that purpose.

The Municipality of Anchorage will offer a third round of its tourism grant program, according to a Visit Anchorage press release. The program will provide grants in one of four amounts — $5,000, $10,000, $25,000 or $50,000 to businesses that “rely primarily on outside visitation to the community for revenue,” the release states.

Grants will be awarded to businesses and organizations that have not yet fully recovered financially, and applicants must demonstrate that they’re continuing to experience revenue loss in 2021. Actual eligibility for the grants will be based on a comparison of 2019 revenue for the period of January through August to 2021 revenue for the same period.

According to the release, to be eligible, businesses must be based in or offer their primary product within the municipality, must be an already existing business or nonprofit “with a significant reliance on leisure and business travel’ and must demonstrate a loss of income from 2019 to 2021.

“And so the criteria for the grants is comparing 2021 against 2019 revenues, and businesses that were still down 40% of their gross receipts are eligible for this round,” said Julie Saupe, president and CEO of Visit Anchorage.

Significant reliance on leisure and business travel, according to the release, means more than 70% of the business’ annual gross receipts must come directly from visitors who travel to Anchorage.

“Because they are tourism grants, we need to know that your business has a significant reliance on visitors to Anchorage from outside the municipality, and that’s a 70% standard,” Saupe said.

According to the release, businesses that have not received grants from earlier rounds of the program will be given priority in this round. However, organizations that did receive funding in earlier iterations of the program are still encouraged to apply this time around too if they meet all the other criteria.

This round of the program contains $2.85 million to spread out amongst the Anchorage tourism industry.

The deadline to apply for this latest round of grants is Oct. 6. Applications can be filled out online and can be found at the Visit Anchorage website. If people have questions about the application process, they can send those to grant@anchorage.net.

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